1.5.12-Pilferingapples
Brick!club: Les Miserables 1.5.12 and 1.5.13 Doubleposting before MASSIVE BACKPOST CATCHUP, thank you rural internet service, what EVEN. At least these chapters are on the same timeline, so I don’t mind talking about them both in one post. I’m…not sure how I feel about Hugo making such a lengthy and comical description of idlers and dandies right before Bamatabois assaults Fantine. The poser clothes (“spurs meant pedestrians”, hah), the wasted energy and money, the idea of the dogs under the table (would dogs still have been a status symbol? Or a rich kid’s concept of a status symbol, maybe?), the casual miserliness, it’s all pretty funny, not useful (or beautiful:P) or impressive but more or less harmless …and then one of these walking jokes goes and casually destroys a person. The “casually” is what gets me about Bamatabois every time; he’s not angry with Fantine, not planning anything, just bored. And so he assaults her, gives her system the final shock needed to start spiraling downward, and gets her in the path of the law…and the next day he probably can’t even remember what she looks like. She was *there*, and he used her for the equivalent of kick-the-can, that’s all. …which is basically what Tholomyes did, come to think of it. And the Thenardiers. Fantine doesn’t even exist to these people who really ruin her; she’s there, she’s entertainment for a season or an hour, or she’s a check in the mail. She’s never a whole person or even a whole problem. Which may be why I don’t hate Javert in this (and why I wanted to try and understand Mme. Victurnien, awful as she was)— at least he’s seriously involved. Every thought he’s said to have here is appalling to me— he weighs people by their bank balance, more or less. He explicitly counts Fantine’s weakness and misery against Bamatabois’ power and comfort and decides that makes Fantine the guilty party. BUT he is seriously considering her; he does actually see her; and he’s weighing her on the same scales he uses for everyone else, explicitly including himself. This doesn’t make me LIKE Javert any at all (sorry, Javert fans! But it’s hard to like him much at this point, there’s a lot of Whoa No going on here.) but it makes me not hate him. I can see what he’s doing, sending Fantine to jail, why it makes sense to him and why he doesn’t feel any sympathy for her. It’s not like Fantine has any sympathy for herself! I feel like she and Javert have a lot in common, ideologywise, at this point, actually. They both agree that Fantine’s behavior puts her beyond civil consideration. It’s just that Fantine thinks there are other things still worth weighing in the arrangement; she’s begging for mercy for Cosette, not herself. Seeing the way Fantine’s internalized social judgement, I wonder how she treated women in her place earlier in her life- did she see them, did she care? If she’d survived this point, gotten the easy life she was hoping for, would she have looked on other ‘fallen’ women with sympathy? Extra horror? I honestly don’t know, but I’m sure I’ll have more time to turn that over in the next chapters. But hey, someone finally steps in to help her! And provokes a Valjean-esque Two Roads Diverged in A Hallucination moment! Even more hallucinatory since Fantine’s all feverish and hallucinating, and yet now we’re not being asked to violate the laws of nature with how the lighting works, which should make Kalevala-Sage happy. But even here, Fantine’s having things Done To her; there’s no choice for her to make, really, except to believe that she’s finally getting a break. Her life’s been out of her hands for a long time, it makes sense that she can’t personally repair what her entire society has done to break it, but this still kind of unnerves me. At least Valjean’s a dude who knows how it feels to be Bought For Morality? …I was a lot more okay with this the first time I read it. And hee for Madeleine knowing every detail of the legal code. It explains what at least some of his reading material is! I guess this could just seem like more Random Valjean Superpowers but to me it ties in well with his original reasons for learning to read, and educating himself at all, back in Toulon- so he can get away from/get back at the legal system somehow. It reminds me of Kirk always being able to rattle off the relevant contradictory regulations— when you KNOW you’re going to be getting in trouble with the system it’s good to know every possible way to hack that system. …I did say if I got intertextual it would be through Star Trek. Commentary Gascon-en-exile Finicky Internet service strikes again! You and several others have commented upon the ”''désœvrés'',” who like the Thénardiers are a class between classes and seem to combine the worst of everything above and below them. As KS points out their gender nonconformativity/neutrality itself seems to make them a target for criticism, though there’s also some of the same derision here as would be directed at the nouveau riche or, in the South, the showier species of white trash (a complex and tangled designation I’ll have to write more on at some point). Anyway, it’s a bit more than a desexualized version of the stereotypical flaming queen, though the absurd attention to dress doesn’t help that honestly. After all, Courfeyrac has dandy-ish qualities and God knows what aesthetic Prouvaire is going for, but we don’t get these elaborate descriptions of their outfits because they are Good Guys and therefore need to represent the positive internal qualities of these character types. I never understood why Fantine is pacing in front of an officers’ café. Aside from being incredibly conspicuous if one happens to be assaulting someone *ahem* I can’t imagine there’s much in the way of clientele at that location. At least give the café some distance if you want to catch an officer sneaking away into a back alley or something. Yeah, I can’t really get into Javert here either. The angel-demon battle is so clichéd and so obvious such that I’m almost glad that Hugo knows how obvious it is, but even without that he does seem to have a cold pleasure in prosecuting Fantine, in a “prostitute going to prison for assaulting a landowner, all is right with the world” sort of way. On the other hand, I find his protracted internal deliberations at Madeleine’s interactions to be so comically over the top that it’s hard to take his rigid ideology seriously. If a few words from the mayor are sufficient to stun him into silence and initiate an unresolved existential crisis over the role of the Law, I wonder what would happen if that mayor just happened to be an ex-convict and just happened to save Javert’s life in a wacky coincidence? One last note on the other side of the angelic and demonic: though her delirious (and possibly also drunk - she did mention she’d drunk brandy, and Hugo is clearly fond of talkative drunks) rambling is repetitive and pathetic, she “''était redevenue belle''" through her misery. Beauty in wretchedness is generally more characteristic of dying angels (for possibly the most infamous example, see Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop) and could be called one of several traits of the nineteenth century female angel that anticipates today’s Mary Sue (or at least Mary Sue Classic, as TVTropes has dubbed that version). Mais non, Fantine suffers so much that she’s beautiful again! Wait, how is that a good thing?